Japanese animes have always struck gold with their pitch-perfect execution of high-concept ideas. Whether it’s the dream-stealing protagonist of Satoshi Kon’s “Paprika” or the ability to decide the fate of people’s lives in “Death Note.” These artworks have always awed us with their endlessly innovative storytelling and mind-boggling philosophical repercussions. Suzume (2023), directed by Makoto Shinkai, is one such flight of fancy that deals with teenage love, familial relations, and the relationship between natural disasters and their impact on human life. It mixes fantasy and supernatural elements with a coming-of-age tale of first love and dealing with the absence of a deceased loved one.
It delightfully plots the course of the adventure and reveals its cards one by one. In the following article, I will analyze and dissect those.
Suzume (2023) Plot Synopsis and Summary :
Suzume Iwato, a fifteen-year-old high school girl, lives with her aunt Tamaki. She has dreams of her younger self, searching for her deceased mother in an otherworldly land. On her way to school, she meets a handsome, charismatic stranger, Souta Munakata, who asks her for the way to the ruins. He needs to find a door there, and after Suzume informs her about one such place nearby, he leaves for the location.
Suzume also goes towards the ruins, spellbound by the boy’s charm. There she enters a huge dilapidated complex with a door at the center. She opens a door and is awestruck by the world she sees in her dreams. Realizing it’s a gateway to another realm, she steps inside but returns to her same world. She tries it multiple times to no avail. After a while, she picks up a stone from the pond, which suddenly turns into a cat, and runs away. Terrified, she rushes back to school.
At school, her classmates find her behavior strange. An earthquake hits the town, and Suzume watches a red tornado arising out of the hills. When she realizes that only she can see it, she rushes to the location of the ruins, where she finds Souta trying to close the door from which this tornado arises. With a lot of difficulty, they close the door and lock it with the key hanging from Souta’s neck. He suffers a cut on his arm, and Suzume takes him to her home to tend to his injury.
There, they introduce themselves to each other. He sits on a baby chair, the last surviving memento from her mother, with one leg missing. She asks him about the “worm” ( the red tornado-like thing), and he reveals the reason for its existence.
It is a giant force that dwells beneath the Japanese Islands. It rages and shakes the land if disturbed, causing earthquakes and Tsunamis. The closing of gates only shuts them temporarily. To make the worm disappear permanently, they have to seal it with a keystone. Souta’s job is to stop it at any cost.
The cat appears on the windowsill, and Suzume feeds him. She asks him to become his cat. He replies affirmatively and likes her for her kindness. Souta suddenly disappears, and the chair starts moving on its own.
The cat runs away, and the chair starts chasing him. Suzume goes after them and lands on a ship about to depart. From there, the cat jumps to another boat leaving Suzume and the chair on the sailing ship. Suzume lies to her aunt Tamaki that she is at her friend Ava’s home and will return the next morning.
She brings some food for Souta, now a chair, but he refuses to eat. He tells her that he got inside the chair due to the curse placed on him by the cat. The relic Suzume picked up earlier was the keystone that turned into this cat. She apologizes for causing him trouble in his important pursuit. However, Souta blames himself for this fiasco as he failed as a “Closer” – the people appointed to avert disasters by closing the gates across Japan.
The next morning, they reach Ehime. The cat has gone viral on social media, with several people posting his pics. Souta decides to go after the cat and advises Suzume to return home as it could be dangerous for her to continue on this mission. But Suzume dismisses his request, asserting his precarious position to be more delicate and in need of a partner. Souta eventually relents.
A girl on a scooter drops some fruit baskets accidentally. With help from Souta, she recollects those fruits, much to the girl’s surprise. The girl and Suzume talk for a while when she sees the worm emanating out of a hillside at some distance.
When she sees Suzume running on the road, the girl offers her a lift. Together they reach the spot, where they find the door in an old abandoned school with the cat greeting them on their arrival. They close the gate before the earthquake and reach the girl, Chika’s, home.
She stays at her place, where they talk about her aunt and boyfriends. They talk about the importance of her work, and Suzume develops a bond with Chika. When she sees the video of Daijin, the cat, walking on a power transmission cable, they decide to leave for Kobe.
She reaches a bus stand under heavy rainfall. A car stops, and the woman offers her a lift as no buses would be coming for some time. Suzume gets into the car with Souta. The woman’s twin children play with the chair in the backseat.
When they reach Kobe, the woman receives the news of the closure of her kids’ school. She asks Suzume to take care of the kids while she goes to work and opens the bar. The kids make life hell for Suzume, annoying her in different ways. Souta comes to her rescue by becoming a moving toy for the children. When he speaks, Suzume tries to explain to the children that he is an AI robot. They start giving him random commands, which annoys Souta.
The woman calls Suzume to help her with customers at the bar. There she sees Daijin with a group of men. The cat rushes out, and Suzume chases her when the worm appears in the closed amusement park.
Souta and Suzume reach the park. He entrusts the duty of closing the gate to her and goes after the cat to regain his body. There they jump into the switchboard room, and the Ferris wheel carrying the gate starts moving, unbalancing Suzume. Somehow, she regains her footing but gets drawn into the world beyond the gate.
Souta understands the vision is deceiving Suzume, and she would fall from the Ferris Wheel if not stopped. He runs after her and invokes the incarnations of God, which stokes the visitors’ memories in Suzume’s mind.
She comes out of her trance, and together they close the gate, shutting down the park. Souta reveals that the world she saw is called ever-after. It houses deceased people, and there all time exists at once.
When she returns, the bar is empty, and she has a warm chit-chat with the woman and her assistant. Souta sees his body freezing at a seashore in front of the gate. He is losing the grip of his body and slowly sinking deeper into the sea. When he is about to freeze, Suzume appears at the door. She kissed the chair in the real world, and Souta woke up with a jolt wondering if she had done something to wake him.
Next, they leave for Tokyo, where Souta lives. He is training to become a teacher and promises to repay her as she is short on her money. They go to Souta’s flat, where he tells Suzume to search for an ancient book about closers and the worm.
She gains new information on keystones. There are two keystones – the Eastern Pillar and the Western Pillar. They seal the disasters which the gates cannot contain. One is in Kyushu, now running around as Dajin, and the other is in Tokyo.
They deduce it is near a huge gate that caused a catastrophic disaster a century ago. Tomoya Serizawa, his classmate, arrives at his doorstep. He informed Suzume that Souta missed his teacher’s exam and did not return the money he owed him. It upsets Suzume, and she blames herself for his missed examination. She steps out to talk to Serizawa when she spots a worm nearby. Suzume and Souta go after it when they encounter Daijin in the path.
They land over the surface of the worm when Suzume nearly falls. Souta rescues her and warns her that the surface is unstable. Daijin reveals to Souta that he is the new keystone, as he transferred his powers to him when they first met at Suzume’s home. Suzume cannot accept this and refuses to use him to seal the worm. But after continuous persuasion from Daijin to save millions from death, she uses the chair keystone to pierce the worm.
She wakes up in a tunnel where she sees the Tokyo gate. Inside, Souta rests as a frozen chair over a mountaintop. Daijin professes her love towards Suzume, to which she responds frantically, lashing out at him and blaming him for Souta’s fate. She decides to rescue Souta from the ever-after and goes to meet his grandfather.
Souta’s grandfather advises her not to do since he now serves the Gods, protecting humanity. But she persists in entering the ever-after, and he tells her to go to the door she opened as a child. After she leaves, a big cat comes to his window sill, and he advises him to follow her.
On her way back, Serizawa offers to help her find Souta. Her aunt Tamaki arrives at the scene and tags along, fearing for her niece’s safety. While on the road, they stop somewhere where Tamaki tries to take her back, which Suzume vehemently refuses. Her aunt scolds her and regrets taking her in after her mother’s death.
She lists all the sacrifices she had to make to ensure her well-being. Sadajin, the big cat, appears out of nowhere, and her aunt goes to Serizawa, taken aback by her outburst at Suzume.
After some distance, they have an accident when Serizawa hears the cat talking. Suzume leaves for the door, followed by her aunt on her bicycle. She drives her furiously to her destination filling Suzume with surprise.
Tamaki tells her that all she said earlier were not the only things she felt. She also felt deep affection and cared about her. They reach the place, and Suzume finds and enters the gate.
She rushes through the debris while Sadaijin fights with the worm. Daijin warns her not to disturb the keystone on the mountaintop. She ignores him and tries to free Souto. She sees his memories moments before turning into a keystone.
Souta returns to human form, but the worm becomes uncontrollable. Suzume realizes that Daijin has been guiding them toward all the open gates. Daijin and Sadajin turn into keystones, and Suzume and Souta wield them, respectively, to seal the worm.
In the aftermath, Suzume sees a child, her younger self, looking for her mother. She gifts the broken leg chair to the girl telling her not to be afraid as she will meet people who love her and whom she loves too. They have a heartwarming conversation, and she reveals she is the future Suzume.
Afterward, she closes the gate and asks Souta to stay with her, standing at the station. He tells her that many gates still need to be closed and he will return after finishing his work. Serizawa tells Tamaki that he owes Souta and not the other way around.
In the epilogue, Suzume resumes her life with Aunt Tamaki. On the same path shown at the beginning, she finds Souta standing in the same place. She smiles and welcomes him back.
Suzume (2023) Ending, Explained:
Who were Daijin and Sadaijin?
They were keystones who took animal form to aid and guide Souta toward the gates. In their material form, wielded by a closer, they seal the worm and keep it from leaving the gates. Earlier, Souta and Suzume misunderstood its intentions and thought it was there to open the gates. But when it helps Suzume to find the door from her childhood, its true intentions dawn upon her, and she uses it to seal the worm and place it on the mountaintop.
Why did Souta turn into the chair, and how he escaped?
Souta thought that Daijin had placed a curse on him, which trapped him inside the chair. However, the real reason was to make Suzume reach the childhood door and meet her younger self to fulfill her destiny. Her mother had made it as a gift to her. She freed Souta from it by letting the true keystone, Daijin, take his place.
What was the meaning of the incantations invoked by Souta?
Souta called upon the divine Gods to protect the lands from disaster, flooding himself with memories of people who lived there once. The people’s feelings suppress the worm and help in closing the gate. The memories of those people provide an aid in recreating those feelings.
Who was the little girl Suzume meets in the ever after?
After Suzume and Souta successfully seal the worm, she sees her childhood self as time existed simultaneously in ever after. She goes to the little Suzume to give her reassurance about the future. The chair with one leg missing becomes the last surviving memento of her mother. She gives it to the little Suzume so she grows up to give her back in a closed time loop.
Where does Souta go after sealing the worm?
When Suzume asks Souta to stay with her, he gently declines the offer. He tells her that he needs to close many more gates before resting. Many places have lost the weight of people’s feelings causing the gates to open. However, he promises her to return once his task finishes.
Suzume resumes her school life while living with Aunt Tamaki when Souta returns to meet her at the same place they first came across each other. She welcomes him back.
